The subject matter herein relates generally to guide hardware for connector systems.
Some electronic connector systems are configured to connect electrical circuit cards, such as daughter cards (or single board computers) to backplanes. The backplane may include multiple connectors such that the backplane is configured to connect to multiple different daughter cards. For example, the backplane may have twenty connectors for mating to twenty different daughter cards. In order to provide guidance for the mating between the connector on one daughter card and a corresponding connector on the backplane, guide hardware may be used to guide and align the mating circuit cards to prohibit damage from misalignment. Furthermore, the guide hardware may provide keying in order to prohibit one daughter card from connecting to the wrong connector of the multiple connectors on the backplane.
Guide hardware sets typically include a receptacle and a plug. Some known guide hardware sets are limited to, for example, five different keying configurations. As a result, these guide hardware sets are able to provide individual connector-specific keying for five different connectors, when at least twenty different keying arrangements may be required due to the number of connectors on the backplane. To address this issue, some connector systems install multiple such guide hardware sets for each daughter card in order to multiply the number of keying configurations. For example, using three such guide hardware sets that each provide five keying configurations, a total of 125 (5×5×5) potential keying configurations are provided.
However, providing additional guide hardware sets to increase the number of potential keying configurations has downsides, including a greater part cost (because of the increased number of hardware sets), a greater assembly time and cost, and a reduction in the available space on the backplane and the daughter cards due to the footprints of the multiple guide hardware sets. Due to the trend of increasing the density of electrical circuitry per area on a circuit card, it is desirable to increase the available space on the backplane, for example, by reducing the number of guide hardware sets mounted to the backplane. The real estate on the backplane that is gained may be used to provide active or passive thermal regulation devices, such as heat sinks or liquid cooling modules. The additional space may also allow for more connectors on the backplane to allow the backplane to connect with more daughter cards. But, a need remains to provide a guide hardware set that is configurable in a sufficient number of potential keying configurations to provide a specific keying configuration for each of the connectors on the backplane without requiring multiple the guide hardware sets for each connector.